Plenty of people find and use drugs to improve what they're feeling, and they're reasonably successful at it, from the inside, from their own perspective.

> Otherwise, that's precisely what you'd do, despite you saying the contrary.

No, it's not, and it's not what most people would do, for reasons too long to get into here. Like I said, there's a lot of literature here. Most people have pretty strong beliefs that they would rather suffer in a real world than have a satisfied fake life with managed feelings. It's only when the pain is too much that they fall back to alternatives.